on Google Scholar and 'electricity sucking mosques'

Came across this post by Paul Kedrosky on "Google Scholar Suckitude." He's a financial commentator with a popular blog. It's interesting to read an outsider's perspective on the scholarly information ecosystem. Kedrosky is frustrated by a few things about Google Scholar. From the comments:

But I also find it messes up dates all the time, with recent papers too hard to find. And I'm unimpressed with its authoritativeness measures, with many quack pieces from quack journals making it through the cracks.

More broadly, I'd like it to tell me more clearly if there is a PDF somewhere. Perhaps back-index from authors/paper to author websites and look for the original paper there. Too often I find the piece referenced, and then have to do a second set of searches to find the author's website where there is often a working paper available. That shouldn't be required.

Funny that I was just admiring the addition of the Google Scholar feature that attempts to locate a free copy of a journal article online if available. Another comment on the post argues that academic libraries have shifted from being information disseminators to information gatekeepers:

The facilitation of easily accessible information, such as the good dope contained in publicly funded research, grants and other knowledge-transmitters, the stuff that's found in academic journals and other walled-enlightenment-gardens; in yesteryear fell in the domain and function of the "library".

However, in recent history, the library's role has changed. 180 degrees. Their actions are similar to them RIAA , only in some ways, much darker: their role as spreader-of-our-knowledge-treasures has petrified into the ghostly statuesque remnant that serves as a fortress of knowledge bigotry requiring secret user identifications and passwords.

The library system in America is 1000 times worse than theRIAA .

The Ivy-Leagued elites and celebrities have no problem gathering information. I'm sure that there have been many times when you've bumped into something like the JSTOR hurdle, only to have a colleague or well-intentioned ivy-league aristocrat quietly email you the journal, article or tidbit of enlightenment that you were seeking.

It's not that way for us ignoramus masses. We've got to unGREENy burn oil, use or gas hog cars, travel to the gigantically inefficient electricity sucking mosques that houses the remnants of old, vermin infested and inked-ladened dead tree parchments -- the method of infomatics-gathering used by our candle-burning-horse-and-buggy ancestors.

It's a system structure benefits the Ivy Leagues. They have the access. They have the secret keys, passwords and easy pathways to the knowledge chambers. To withhold the public's golden knowledge, to keep the masses enslaved to illiteracy and darkness -- isn't it unconscionable?

finding full text with Google Scholar

The Google Operating System Blog had a post the other day that alerted me to a relatively new feature in Google Scholar. For each article in a result set, Google Scholar will point you to a free, unrestricted copy of the article on the web (if available) with a little green ►.

With many academic journal publishers allowing authors to post copies of their articles on their personal websites, it is now common for scholarly articles in subscription journals to be available for free on the open web. Below is an example of an article, with a copy available from a website in an academic domain (sorry for the tiny image).


This is a good example of Google Scholar leveraging the Google web index to provide something you can't get within the research systems that libraries have built and licensed. It's also yet another reminder that libraries and publishers have lost their role as sole provider and intermediary for academic content.

I've pointed out previously in this blog that creators of research products for libraries do not (or are not able) to take advantage of web indexes as they create their products. I wonder if openurl resolver vendors or someone like OCLC could offer this feature by tapping into something like the Alexa Web Search service to mine the web for full copies of a given article? It might be hard to do on the fly with a resolver request.

I'm guessing that Google Scholar will have 90%+ of scholarly articles in existence in its index at the citation level in the not-to-distant future. It is able to mine so many places for citations: web sites, scanned books and journals, and many publishers' archives, etc.

As OCLC loads article citations into Open WorldCat, I wonder if they have considered a more "brute force" approach to finding citations. They could mine the web for them like Google. Of course, this would introduce all sorts of possibilities for errors and lack of bibliographic control. Google Scholar must have lots of errors in the citations it collects, but it seems to efficiently collate like citations together and recognize which citations are the most referenced.

on research methods and expectations

It's always interesting to hear opinions about academic libraries from non-librarians. The Burnt-Out Adjunct has some interesting comments about a piece in Inside Higher Ed covering some initiatives aimed at improving undergraduate research methods.

One of the themes that he touches on is the fragmentation of library search systems in a Google/iTunes world.

Here is where the fault lines of generational expectations come into stark relief: Profs expect students to march into the library and acquaint themselves with the subject’s/discipline’s fiefdom. If not, then the student is lazy and lacks the necessary drive or will. The Natives don’t expect to have to navigate fiefdoms. For them, at least thus far, knowledge and data have been without borders. It does not occur to them that there would be a specific database for articles about Colonial literature that is not accessible through a quick key-word search from their dorm.

So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.

I think that one of the ideas that s/he's sort of putting out there is that if search systems for academic content were really good, we wouldn't need to worry about teaching students research methods. I just don't think that's the case.

First, things like Google Scholar, general academic research databases like Academic Search Premier, already provide an experience that is pretty much akin to Google. An undergrad can go to one of these places and find three scholarly articles on a topic very easily, arguably as easily as doing a Google Search.

In order to really do good research, however, students need to know the scholarly communication system. They need to understand the differences between the various types of things that come up in a Google/Scholar search. Arguably, the scholarly communication system is getting more complex, not less, with all sorts of preprints, gray literature, blog posts, etc. getting put out there by academics.

Expectations for the research that undergraduate students do should be rising with the proliferation of digital sources, search systems, and tools for analysis. Students should be expected to cite more sources now when writing a paper on a given topic. Given all of the primary material out there in digital archives of various types, they should be using more primary sources, and doing more sophisticated things with those sources.

This is only logical given the networked world that college graduates will work. I don't care what industry you go into: law, medicine, business, higher ed, things are getting more complex and globalized, and you need to be able to find, organize, analyze, and manage huge amounts of information to be successful.

Academic libraries will only survive and thrive with rising expectations about research. If students just need to submit those three articles, Google Scholar will replace us and we'll whither away.

Interestingly, the piece in Inside Higher Ed does not use the term "information literacy" anywhere. I think that it has gone out of style.